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Startup Name *

GroveStreams

What problem are you solving?

Providing actionable intelligence in the cloud for the Internet of Things as massive amounts of data arrives.

What is your solution?

Our solution is to apply today’s business intelligence capabilities to the internet of things along with the following capabilities: – Device and stream modeling – Device data logging – Data Visualizations – Complex expression based stream analytics – Event detection with Notifications – Geo tracking – Public API that exposes almost everything – Big Data (we can manage millions to billions of streams) – SaaSGroveStreams is more than an application. It is a cloud platform that many applications can be built on top of.Many vertical IoT applications will be built in the coming years. We want GroveStreams to be the platform of choice for these new applications. Customers can use us as is or build their own unique solution on top of us. Think of us as the Oracle of the Internet of Things.

Why is this a great opportunity?

McKinsey Global Institute: “We estimate the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things to be $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion per year by 2025…”Several IoT cloud platforms have entered the market in the last few years, but none provide the capabilities and the reliability that GroveStreams provides at the low fees we charge. Most of our customers come from these existing platforms.The market is hungry for a low cost IoT solution that scales – one that can answer the tough questions as data arrives from all of their data sources, including devices.

This warehouse is emptied every two days. A few small changes to operations can make a huge difference.

Franki Chamaki

Coke’s Sydney Startup Accelerator Team is launching a novel big data competition called SydneyFirehose.com. The team which was founded by Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking has launched a number of really interesting initiatives over the last six months, centred around solving real meaty problems for Coke and creating new business opportunities and partnerships with startups.

Analysing big data can lead to big insights and a greater understanding of business problems and ways to solve them.

The Sydney Firehose: Big Data Startup Competition invites entrepreneurs to create something useful, marketable and unique by analyzing a huge set of data (1 TB/150,000,000 records), which will be given to them by Coca Cola Amatil, Coke’s Australian partner and bottler.

Jason Hosking

The data is basically the company’s supply chain data, collected by the company for the last 3 years. The data includes information of about CCA’s suppliers, clients, products, deliveries and orders.

The aim of the competition is to build an application or business that will make improvements to the companies operations by analyzing this data.

Big Data startups find it tough to find big companies that are willing to hand over their full operational history.

By providing the means and access to a huge set of data, the event aims at promoting innovation and as a result will hopefully help launch a number of new businesses.

The event is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, who want to get access to an enormous quantity of data and use this to gain business insights and develop applications.

The features of the event include :

1. Coca Cola Amatil supplying three years of their Australian supply chain data for the entrepreneurs to access and utilize.

2. A platform to collaborate and learn from fellow entrepreneurs and mentors.

3. A chance for the participant to pitch their idea to a large prospective client, Coca Cola.

4. A great chance to meet extraordinary people from the entrepreneurship world and learn from them. The event will be judged by some great business leaders and entrepreneurs such as : Bruce Herbert, Rick Baker, Gerhard Voster, Ann Parker and Franki Chamaki.

They have some great prizes for the winner, $3000 in cash, startup training and 3 months of co-working experience with the Pollenizer team and the opportunity to pitch Coke as a customer for 3 months.

Coke trucks deliver to up to 40 customers per day

When and Where ?

The event will be held on the 15th, 16th and 23rd of November 2013. The participants can register on their website http://www.sydneyfirehose.com. The seats of the event are limited and are priced at $20. There are 20 slots each for entrepreneurs, designers and engineers.

The event will be held at :

The Hive

180 Commonwealth St

Surry Hills, NSW 2010

The Organizers

The event is co-organised by Pollenizer. A startup that co-founds businesses and organizes startup events like Firehose. Pollenizer was founded by Mick Liubinskas and Phil Morle in 2008. Mick Liubinskas is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist.

Mick and Phil Morle, the CEO of Pollenizer, worked in the team of Kazaa, a P2P sharing application that saw its rise during the end of the first generation of P2P networks such as Napster. In its golden days, Kazaa was downloaded and used by millions across the ‘World Wide Web’ for P2P sharing (over 300 million at its peak making it the most downloaded software in history at the time). They were also part of the team that helped launch Spreets.com which was sold to Yahoo Australia for $40m 18 months after launching.

The most unique feature of the event is it’s openness. The idea of making normally very tightly held data available to potential startups is a great initiative for the company and the potential startups.

Hopefully this initiative will see new businesses launched with Coke as a customer and help CCA improve its operations.

I attended a presentation by Venture Capitalist Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures last week, (apparently the largest Sydney Tech Meetup ever) at @Fishburners. Bill is a mad keen kiteboarder who teamed up with Susi Mai to create Mai Tai Global a group of exclusive events where Venture Capitalist, Industry and Entrepreneurs get together to talk business and kite surf at fantastic locations around the world (Bill seems to love his work).

He made the observation that successful internet companies achieved explosive growth when they removed friction from existing real world processes.

The first 3 waves were very capital-intensive, with companies raising $100s of millions, 10 years ago even for a small play startup you had to raise millions of dollars to buy servers, fit out a data centre put everyone in groovy offices and run a huge launch party to get the buzz going.

The 4th wave is far more capital efficient, they work from home, use Open Source software, use Cloud Computing and pay by the hour and most of their tools or free or almost free. As a result startups are launching successfully on $20-100k and getting enough traction to either get to cashflow or at least to a series A round.

As an example one of Bill’s investment’s Tweetdeck was written by unemployed IT contractor who liked Twitter but didn’t like the user interface and decided to build something better, he started with $300k angel round, $1m Series A and then $3m Series B and then sold for a rumoured $40-50 million to Twitter a few years later.

What’s next

Wave 5 will be about Big data, collecting and storing data being created by our mobile devices and the estimated 50 billion smart devices which have some sensor and computing capability but are not traditional computing devices, collectively grouped as the Internet of Things.

Personalised Health Data

Internet of Things

Personal Genomics

Unstructured data is everywhere, he gave the example of a Map being full of data, but most of it is not sitting in tables on a database.When you add Structured Data + unstructured data = info

One of Bill’s investee companies Treasuredata has a dream team of entrepreneurs and investors including Bill, Jerry Yang and James Lindenbaum from Heroku. The data platform has just passed the milestone of 1 trillion recordsuploaded and on the current run rate expect to hit 2 trillion records next quarter.

He made the comment that “Old world winners” such as Walmart really understood their data well.

New world winners are virtualising physical assets and turning them into Virtual Assets. Examples were Uber, AirBnB, VMware and Dropbox generating huge databases with tags and meta data about physical assets.and unlocking huge value in the process.

Australia

Bill seems to spend a lot of time out here (for a US based VC) and has made a quite a few investments including the recent $3m round in Canvaafter founder Melanie Perkins spent 3 years pitching him.

Canva Founders

One of the things he finds attractive is some of the grant programs such as Commercialisation Australia’s Early Stage Commercialisation grants which offer matching funds which basically double the VCs investment.

We were starting to see big global tech companies formed and emerging from Australia such as Atlassian, Freelancer and others, where the businesses were becoming significant on the world stage or leaders in their space.

Increasingly investors were putting funds directly into Australian Pty Ltd companies rather than forcing them to move to the US and form a Delaware company.

Other companies Bill mentioned included

Tableau a big data analytics platform that allows users to upload data and use their slick front end to analyse data in real time without using any database or excel queries

Scribd new deal monthly subscriber deal where you can read unlimited books for a flat monthly fee, they are trying to become the Netflix for books

Glyde a used goods site which allows users to buy and sell used Smart Phones and Tablets but will expand to other used goods as the market depth of each category hits critical mass.